Buddhism states that you're reborn based on what you helped create in your last life. So if you were an asshole and caused a lot of suffering, then you're going to experience that suffering as the other side.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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~~suicide~~ reroll
FTFY
Thankfully there's absolutely no evidence of reincarnation and even if it did exist, we clearly don't remember past lives so I consider that not the same person anyways.
Lucky bastard didn't wake up with their entire life's worth of existential dread when they were six sm mf h, "We" might not be the best word here bud, whether or not you actually care inclusively about other people's experiences or go on whatever tangent about mental health
Was that supposed to be coherent? Yes, "we" you have no evidence.
taps called it
Religion isn't doing you any favors, clearly. Blocking you so enjoy raging into the void on a showerthoughts thread. Hopefully your next life is a pin worm in a 90 year old man's sphincter.
shrugs happened way before I had religion bud, also continuing to red flag ain't doing you much either, if you wanted coherence, it might be nice for you to give evidence that we don't, or you know, work on your idea of 'Relateable Evidence' instead of 'Innate experience' and go give your evidential quandary on how this hotdog is gross to everyone? Because you don't want to eat it.
To all these nice shower thoughts people who read this, a 90 year old man's asshole is the preferred niche of the pinworm, the pinworm is having the best life and parties in this old man's butt, should worry more about being the 90 year old man
Since no one can remember their past lives, I would say that it wouldn't much matter what we are next, or what we were before. All those things, what if you were those before? You could have been someone horrifically tortured to death in the Middle Ages/Dark Ages, but you wouldn't remember it now. So, it wouldn't much matter what you are in the next life.
Since there's no tracking from life to life, there's no purpose to it. Nothing is gained. Like if you were mean to a specific kind of person in one life, and you became one of those people (say, a Muslim, or an overweight person) in your next life. I mean so what? It's not like you learn your lesson, having gone from a bigot of privilege to the victim of said biogtry. Everyone has it rough somewhere. And no one gets out alive.
I used to know a guy in middle school who at one point, believed that there was a kind of active memory reincarnation. You don't remember while alive, but between lives you remember it all, so you choose or you are assigned a future life depending on what you need to learn to reach enlightenment. In that future life, your memory is wiped, but when you're done living that life, you have all the previous life memories and you keep doing that until you figure out what you need to in order to reach enlightenment. I don't think it was Buddhism or Taoism or any of those Eastern religions. It sounded made up. I don't recall the name. And he never really got involved with it, he was just telling me about it and I never quite forgot.
Somebody else already posted Andy Weir's "The Egg" in this comment section so I'll just pull this excerpt from it instead of linking the whole thing again.
“Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
The problem is you're seeing it as punishment, when instead it's a necessary journey on the path of enlightenment.
I am pretty sure you can only get enlightened as a human being, so being reborn as something else definitely won't help.
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[off topic]
In 'The Sandman' stories by Neil Gaiman there's a scene where a 12,000 year old wizard is finally killed.
When he meets Death, he boasts that he had a pretty great run.
Death tells him that he got what everyone gets, a single lifetime.
The Egg by Andy Weir
A short horror story:
You die.
You meet "god".
God says: "Next life, you're born as one of the victims of Epstein Island"
💀
So in other words, you're a pretty girl with a rough home life so you end up getting trafficked.
Not to sound like a dick, but most endings to that story wind up far, far worse than winding up on a Caribbean (or wherever TF it is) island with a bunch of rich dudes. I think most wind up strung out, OD'd, battered, on their own with a couple kids and no real means to support themselves and no skills to speak of, aside from turning tricks nobody wants because they're so messed up. Except for more messed up dudes.
Not to minimise anyone's suffering, but I'd say the far more likely outcome of winding up in a crack house is far worse. Most of those women and girls would probably kill to wind up on a billionaire's island. A slave in luxury lives a bit better than a slave in poverty.
Make it the Middle East and it gets far worse. Some time in second or third grade, a bunch of older women grab you, drag you into an abandoned building, strip you, and maim you so you can't ever really experience pleasure, because pleasure is reserved for males. You get an infection and die without ever having really lived, or you don't and you're a sex slave but you don't get anything out of it. Or you get something out of it but it's so hard to reach climax that you do more and more depraved stuff (and with more partners) to get there and some of these people like it rough, so you go through hell chasing that dragon. And most of these guys know it so they're actively working to keep you from getting there.
...
Generally speaking, if you're reading this, if you're online, with an electronic device from this decade, and you own it, you're in the 1%, at least worldwide. You're one of the lucky ones. Whatever human you get reincarnated as is likely to be much worse regardless of whether you're a girl, or a Muslim, or in the Middle East, or trafficked by billionaires. You could be starving and malnourished — in Africa, or in Detroit.
If you liked that blurp and want more, Exurb1a wrote several (vaguely connected) books on the matter. I cannot tell you anything more without spoiling it.
The Fifth Science, The Prince of Milk, Geometry for Ocelots, Logic Beach: Part I
Very good story. Actually better than either 'The Martian' or 'Project Hail Mary.'
Awesome. These days I had this thought about what if after we die we experience everything we did to other people out of their perspective. But this is much better.
Who says you get reincarnated right away? It could be a 1000 years between your death and rebirth!
That's how I set it up in my silly comedy Isekai, Maizy's Tails (it's free to read on the web if you care... Just search it, it'll be the first link): After death souls need to be "aged" at least 1000 years before they can be put in a new body. The gods think it's a multiversal rule but the MC figures out a workaround 😁
It actually opens with the gods bidding on souls from Earth... A world that ended about a million years prior to the auction (because that's how long it took to sort and categorize them all) 🤣
What if reincarnation was just a religious misinterpretation of the concept that all your matter will be recycled infinitely into the environment as compost, then grass, trees, salmon, bears, beetles, mushrooms and bacteria etc, all at the same time.
Under the principle that you are the universe experiencing itself subjectively, recycling yourself now or later makes little difference on your endless journey other than being a wasted opportunity for experienceing it all. A human has an amazing opportunity to experience thought, music, wine, chocolate, love and all the other things in the way a mushroom likely doesn't.
What do you mean? I could just kill myself until I'm born into a rich family, that would be awesome!
That would depend on reincarnation rules. if rerolling isint pure rng and its based in your karma level killing yourself self would lower your score.
Someone will come up with a strat to reroll into something obscure like a wood louse and farm so much positive karma with an exploit that it won't matter how negative you were.
Love this mindset. Break the game! break the game!
Monkey's paw - you are now Elon's umpteenth child who's only purpose is to serve as a bullet shield.
Problem is you'd forget your plan the next life
Universe is trolling us
Well, if I forget everything in the next life, that won't be me any more. In a sense, I would be permanently gone regardless of whether it's technically the same soul.
How do explain this.
Say you had a trumatic childhood experience and repress all your memories before age 12. Did you "die" at age 12? Were your "reborn" at age 12?
"You" is like this camera that records things. If you swap out the SD card, is it still the same camera?
Your "soul" is the camera, the SD card is your brain.
Get what I'm saying?
Repressed memories from trauma still leave subconscious changes in behaviour, though.
If I lost all my memories until the age of 12 and no trace of any habit or thought remained, then yes. Whoever I used to be died.
I am my brain and the memories it contains. I am the SD card.
I don't like the idea that "memory = identity"
Memory is part of you, but doen't solely define you.
If someone made an identical clone of you, like every atom and molecule, even the neurons. Is that "you"? Did you split into 2?
If we then destroy the original, are "you" still "alive". I mean someone has the exact same memories, same atoms.
That's just Ship of Theseus and can't be defined.
I'm not made of the same atoms and molecules as I was a decade ago. Some of them might be still around, but it's mostly completely new particles. Am I still the same person I was a decade ago? If not, how come I can claim ownership of stuff some other guy with the same name bought back then?
I think I've read that on the quantum level you actually can't make the exact same configuration of particles and energy levels in two places at the same time. Trying to create a copy of an object (or, in general, any configuration of particles) would inevitably cause the original to cease to exist. But it's also mostly a thought experiment, as we can't do that with more than a few quantum particles at a time.
So far, as best as humanity is able to tell, your memories are you. If we ever get to Star Trek style teleportation, maybe we can define that more rigourously.
Quick edit: I am quite enjoying this debate, though - interesting to hear other people's takes on identity, soul and all that stuff.
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Shelly Kagan has the best reasoning about souls I've seen so far, he makes a pretty compelling case that we have no soul. I recommend this playlist to everyone, it's so good :
Depends on what kinda reincarnation your talking about and how it works/memory of past life's etc.
I like the thought that I get reincarnated into everyone ever existed and live those life's to learn as much as possible.
Oh, I watched a Korean dorama about that, the name is Death’s Game (2023). Wasn’t very good to my taste, but the idea is quite interesting.
Even if reincarnation is real, it really wouldn't be you living as a cockcroach.
Oh?
Please tell us what it IS then, since maybe you’ve gone to the other side and made it back in any significant way like exactly no one in this world has.
Let's assume it's real. Do you identify yourself with any of your past lives?
How should I know that I had any, and how can you tell? It’s not like there are symptoms; or even a thermometer to gauge if one has had one. Some must be doing it for the first time.
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